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bmearns writes "Over the past few weeks we've been hearing a lot about a possible breakthrough in decoding the infamous Voynich manuscript, made by a team of botanists who suggested that the plants depicted in the manuscript may have been from the New World and the mysterious writing could be a form of an Aztec language. But the latest development comes from linguist Stephen Bax, of Bedfordshire University, who believes he has identified some proper names (including of the constellation 'Taurus') in the manuscript and is using these as a crib to begin deciphering the rest of the text, which he believes comes from the near east or Asia."

...yet another researcher reports their findings that one of the Rorschach inkblots may definitely be a picture of a face...

While this has been modded "funny," it really should be marked "insightful."

For a century now, there have been numerous people -- including serious researchers -- who have chased after crazy theories regarding this manuscript. This particular study seems to involve some people who see a few blotches of ink on a couple of the illustrations of plants (among many weird drawings in the manuscript, it must be said), and decide that these must be New World plants.

Anyone else get the feeling that this is pretty much the only ongoing legendary Discovery Channel special mystery that actually got solved. Atlantis? Who knows? Stone henge? Not really solved. Nostradamus? Super debatable. But finally, what seems like yet another impossible eternal mystery is FINALLY being solved! And in my lifetime! I can't even think of any other comparison similar to this.

Atlantis was solved over 2000 years ago: Plato made the story up. He says as much. It was never intended to be taken as an actual real place, it was just a story told by a fictional character in one of his dialogs (the Timaeus, to be specific) to make a point.

But there are some linguistic patterns [plosone.org] in it. It also makes sense that the text isn't entirely random, since it would be easier to write something coherent than to come up with something entirely random. It might be the equivalent of Lorem ipsum, but the odds are that it's not entirely random.

Landing on the moon wasn't a mystery. Splitting the atom was predicted. The Higgs Boson was solved, just not proven and proving theories is quite boring compared to creating them, neutrinos were already theorized to exist, they merely proved it, and "men and women are different" is not new.

Rather not. It's one of the pet hypotheses, but according to Platon (who first told about Atlantis), it was one of his myths to explain something. Even the person who talks about the fictional Atlantis (Timaios) is probably fictional. Planton told several myths (like the one about the spheric humans), and all have the same character: They are introduced in his dialogs as a monolog of the older of both persons, and the person always claims oral tradition as source. Why Atlantis should have been real, while t

1/ Write a whole lot of vague waffle that could mean anything.2/ Wait five hundred years.3/ Pretend waffle contains predictions about things that have happened, after the fact. Don't worry, you've 500 years of stuff to pick from, something is bound to fit somewhere if you're not too fussy about accuracy.5/ Solved.

Stonehenge has been at least partialy solved - the rocks are bell stones, when struck with metal they each make unique sounds. This would explain why they were hauled such a distance, and we can pretty safely assume their purpose was musical, although whether that was for entertainment, religion, or what is still unknown.

Stonehenge has been at least partialy solved - the rocks are bell stones,

Citation required.

Considering that the stones have been significantly eroded (not just by weather ; humans including generations of souvenir hunters have taken their chip, and many of the stones were significantly re-shaped multiple times during the site's 1500-odd years of use, including at least two major rebuilding and re-arrangement episodes.

But don't let facts and evidence get in the way of telling a nice story.

[Shrug] The Daily Flail and the Royal College of Arts aren't very high on my list of reliable sources ; though I'd expect one of the Royal Colleges to hold to reasonable standards of scholarship, but I wouldn't expect the Flail [qwghlm.co.uk] to honour that. . But more importantly, you've carefully (or accidentally ; I don't know how much you actually know about Stonehenge) shifted from referring to "the stones" being "bell stones", to citing information about the bluestones.

[Shrug] The Daily Flail and the Royal College of Arts aren't very high on my list of reliable sources ; though I'd expect one of the Royal Colleges to hold to reasonable standards of scholarship, but I wouldn't expect the Flail [qwghlm.co.uk] to honour that.

Ah I can see this is going to be a genuine and rational argument when your first salvo is attacking the messenger.

But more importantly, you've carefully (or accidentally ; I don't know how much you actually know about Stonehenge) shifted from referring to "the stones" being "bell stones", to citing information about the bluestones.

This doesn't even make any sense. The bluestones are bellstones or ringing rocks. There is a video where a guy hits them with a hammer and makes all sorts of musical notes. Initially they went back to the quarry where the stones originated and did the same thing, finding the same property. There are many other videos of people doing the same thing with other such rocks. Are you trying to say tha

Looking at a random page from the book, the manuscript is clearly nonsensical, perhaps someone's attempt to leave a coded riddle, but certainly no ancient record of exotic flora or other scientific knowledge. The same "word" is repeated four or five times on each line, with only one different word appearing on the line, often differing from the repeated word by only one "letter", at other times looking like it could be an English word in barely legible script.

Looking at a random page from the book, the manuscript is clearly nonsensical, perhaps someone's attempt to leave a coded riddle, but certainly no ancient record of exotic flora or other scientific knowledge. The same "word" is repeated four or five times on each line, with only one different word appearing on the line, often differing from the repeated word by only one "letter", at other times looking like it could be an English word in barely legible script.

So if I understand you right, you're trying to tell us this is some ancient person's version of the lyrics to badger badger badger.

You do realise that in the languages families this is puported to be from, that's normal patterning of a aggulnative language; heavy on prefixes, and repetition (both word and morpheme level) This is compounded by the fact many of the languages are few on morphemes.

"fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.Shol.Shory.cThres.y,kor.Sholdysory.cKhar.or,y.kair.chtaiin.Shar.are.cThar.cThar,dansyaiir.Sheky.or.ykaiin.Shod.cThoary.cThes.daraiin.sa o'oiin.oteey.oteos,roloty" -- Beginning of First page of the voynich transcript using latin characters. -- Looks like a language to me.

I personally love http://my.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%80%A1%E1%80%9B%E1%80%B1%E1%80%AC%E1%80%84%E1%80%BA This example for a language that is nothing but repeated circles.

Or look at http://dv.wikipedia.org/wiki/%DE%89%DE%A6%DE%87%DE%A8_%DE%9E%DE%A6%DE%8A%DE%B0%DE%99%DE%A7 For an example of repeated glyphs over, and over again.

Or even inuktitut article for the eye: http://iu.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%90%83%E1%94%A8Seeng repeated glyphs over and over, looks like complete gibberish, or variants that aren't significant, actually are. dot over the i or no? significant in Turkish. i, j, originally just a cursive swish to differentiate i at end of word from a trailing tail.

The page I was looking at was more like "Bacon bacon bacon beacon bacon pork. Beacon bacon pork bacon bacon beacon.... ad nauseum, the lines morphing over time but the repitition being constant. It was illustrated with a half dozen naked cherubs, but I can't seem to find it now (was on the first page of a Google image search this morning). Looking at other pages, there seem to be many pages with patterns in the text (same word not quite lining up vertically the entire way up the page), which make it look

Looking at a random page from the book, the manuscript is clearly nonsensical

Yeh, you're right. The world's greatest linguists, historians, and cryptographers have been studying this for a century and are still undecided about the nature of the work, but you "looked at a random page" and have a pretty solid grasp on it.

When I was younger, early 20s back in the 1990s , once of my best friends started to slip into schizophrenia (it ran in his family). He constantly jotted drawings and writings on paper, which grew increasingly more bizare. Started with pictures of aliens and UFOs (Which he'd say where just him having fun) but over time turned into numerological type things (My first letter is T my second is C, I am top cat, my age adds up to 9 which upside down is a third of 666 etc etc etc) and increasingly more paranoid mystery theories. He'd draw charts explaining the relationships between things.

And since he was a biology student, he drew lots of plants. Particularly his favorite, marihuana.

Whats to say this isn't the mad scrawlings of a schizophrenic mad man, 500 years ago? It'd certainly fit the pattern.

Whats to say this isn't the mad scrawlings of a schizophrenic mad man, 500 years ago? It'd certainly fit the pattern.

While not impossible, the text that remains is 240 pages (each page roughly 6.3 x 9 inches). Being as it seems to have some coherent themes across sections, it seems rather unlikely that a disturbed person could have written it on a whim.

Length and coherency don't preclude madness. One of my father's patients claimed to visit another world frequently and wrote a very long book detailing the world and its inhabitants. I have a huge map he drew of the place with detail so fine you need a magnifying glass to read it all and plates of the (not surprisingly) bizarre animals that lived there. The whole thing is incredibly detailed and quite internally consistent. Schizophrenia is not orthogonal to intelligence.

There's also work like Henry Darger's [wikipedia.org], which is extremely lengthy and follows a coherent theme.

Huh? The statement "Schizophrenia is not orthogonal to intelligence" does not say that schizophrenia == intelligence (while your own statement says that schizophrenia != intelligence), it says that just because someone is schizophrenic it does not mean that they're not intelligent.

Did he ever publish it? Not only would it be an interesting read, it would most certainly make a lot of GMs and Storytellers happy to have a complete world at hand that isn't split out over 1000 source books that cost something bordering a new car to get all of them...

There's a copy of it at the New York Public Library [nypl.org] and one of his relatives has a site [webs.com] with a scan of the book (I can't believe they let me photocopy the whole book!) and pictures of the plates.

It was never published AFAIK, but there was a documentary film made about Darger and his book which mostly summarized the plot, including animations of many of the illustrations. Worth seeking out IMHO.

While not impossible, the text that remains is 240 pages (each page roughly 6.3 x 9 inches). Being as it seems to have some coherent themes across sections, it seems rather unlikely that a disturbed person could have written it on a whim.

Never underestimate outsider art, especially if crazy outsider art. Look at the works of Henry Darger [wikipedia.org] and his book The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion which is over 15,000 typed pages. Along with that he has countless artworks associated with it, a 10,000 page handwritten sequel, and some other books including The Story of my Life which after 200 pages of talking about his life goes into almost

So what you're saying is that your friend was close to discovering the secret of reality until THEY intervened, concocted the usual schizophrenia 'diagnosis' and then gave him a life time supply of anti-thinking pills?

I remember reading an article long ago that said that the Voynich manuscript was made by a con man that wanted to make some quick cash by writing down some gibberish in a book, claiming that it had mystical origins, and selling it off to someone with more money than common sense. (In this case, that person would be Emperor Rudolf II.) Some linguists have said that the statistical patterns of the text match what would be expected of a natural language, but the article that I read suggested that it is possible to create a random text that looks like a natural language by randomly choosing syllables with a special table. This table of syllables is constructed in such a way that the probability of a certain syllable occurring depends on the syllable that precedes it. To me, this seems like a much more reasonable explanation than the idea that New World lanuages somehow made it into a book that was (according to Wikipedia) was written in Europe between 1404 and 1438.

You may want to read the article before jumping to conclusions. The authors have identified many of the plants and animals as those of the New World, including specific breeds of cattle introduced from Spain, animals like the Ocelot, and others. Their study is very thorough, and it includes study of texts they have found with similar scripts and languages. Their conclusion is that it came from 16th century Spain, and was written in an Aztec language by natives who had been educated by the Spanish (and their evidence for this is quite convincing). From the conclusion of the research:

We note that the style of the drawings in the Voynich Ms. is similar to 16th century codices from Mexico (e.g., Codex Cruz-Badianus). With this prompt, we have identified a total of 37 of the 303 plants illustrated in the Voynich Ms. (roughly 12.5% of the total), the six principal animals, and the single illustrated mineral. The primary geographical distribution of these materials, identified so far, is from Texas, west to California, south to Nicaragua, pointing to a botanic garden in central Mexico, quite possibly Huaztepec (Morelos). A search of surviving codices and manuscripts from Nueva España in the 16th century, reveals the calligraphy of the Voynich Ms. to be similar to the Codex Osuna (1563-1566, Mexico City). Loan-words for the plant and animal names have been identified from Classical Nahuatl, Spanish, Taino, and Mixtec. The main text, however, seems to be in an extinct dialect of Nahuatl from central Mexico, possibly Morelos or Puebla.

You may want to read the article before jumping to conclusions. The authors have identified many of the plants and animals as those of the New World, including specific breeds of cattle introduced from Spain, animals like the Ocelot, and others. Their study is very thorough, and it includes study of texts they have found with similar scripts and languages. Their conclusion is that it came from 16th century Spain, and was written in an Aztec language by natives who had been educated by the Spanish (and their evidence for this is quite convincing).

Read this [ciphermysteries.com] for a contrary (and, I think, better informed) view.

I wish the author of that article provided links to the information about letter forms. I'd like to read about that. The age of the vellum doesn't help much, as vellum was often re-used. Of course, there may be evidence that this text was the first use of the vellum, though the article does mention finding previous text with a blacklight. Maybe I should be glad there aren't links to this other research. I might lose half my morning.

Which would mean, that for it to fit into those New World stories it would have to have been made a century BEFORE it was filled out, AND then someone gave the empty book to the natives to fill it out with drawings and text.

On the other hand... someone finding couple of piles of old unwritten material, binding it together, filling it out with plausible nonsense and selling it to some rich amateur alchemist... that sounds a lot more plausibl

With respect to your low uid# and the awesome bit of Schiller in your sig, I have to point that the age of the vellum does little to prove that the text originates earlier than some assumptions. Vellum was used over and over. So, unless we have some clear evidence that it has not been reused, the manuscript text may well be written on vellum significantly older than itself.

Umm, no. Vellum was sometimes reused once, and it was common enough to scrape off, wash, and reuse stuff that there is a term for it, palimpsest [wikipedia.org]. While there are quite rare examples of a "double palimpsest" (reused twice), it certainly was not at all the norm to use vellum "over and over."

So, unless we have some clear evidence that it has not been reused, the manuscript text may well be written on vellum significantly older than itself.

No, I don't really buy that theory either. As someone who has actually spent quite a bit of time working with early manuscripts and has even played a hand at deciphering previous "scraped off" texts in palimpsests, I ca

One... we know of the practice of scraping and reusing parchment cause it tends to be visible, often with naked eye. [wikipedia.org]

Two... Traces of scraping tend to be noticeable. And there are some. Well... One. [wikipedia.org] And it kinda points in the scam direction, rather than in the direction of Aztecs writing on scrapped parchment given to them by monks who taught them to read and write and draw in European style and fashion but not in European alphabet or language.

Which would mean, that for it to fit into those New World stories it would have to have been made a century BEFORE it was filled out, AND then someone gave the empty book to the natives to fill it out with drawings and text.

...

Umm.. did you know that the production of blank books was a common practice, and in fact still is? They were, and are, used for diaries, ledgers, log books, sketch books, etc., etc. At the beginning of the 1500s, when a book about the New World could be produced, a blank book made 80 or so years earlier was hardly unimaginable.

At the beginning of the 1500s, when a book about the New World could be produced, a blank book made 80 or so years earlier was hardly unimaginable.

"Unimaginable"? No. Very unlikely? Yes.

The production of blank paper books for various purposes in recent centuries is common enough, but producing a blank vellum book only to sit on a shelf for nearly a century without being used would be quite unusual. Do you realize how many animals had to be killed to make this book, not to mention effort gone into scraping, stretching, treating, and otherwise processing each page of skin? This was a very expensive and wasteful endeavor... making such a book to s

I remember reading an article long ago that said that the Voynich manuscript was made by a con man that wanted to make some quick cash by writing down some gibberish in a book, claiming that it had mystical origins, and selling it off to someone with more money than common sense. (In this case, that person would be Emperor Rudolf II.) Some linguists have said that the statistical patterns of the text match what would be expected of a natural language, but the article that I read suggested that it is possible to create a random text that looks like a natural language by randomly choosing syllables with a special table. This table of syllables is constructed in such a way that the probability of a certain syllable occurring depends on the syllable that precedes it.

His name was John Dee [wikia.com], or maybe his buddy Edward Kelley [wikipedia.org], both pretty interesting characters.

I also believe that you are referring to the hoax theory of Gordon Rugg [keele.ac.uk], but I found that unconvincing (such ciphers were popular 100 to 150 years after the creation of Voynich, and even if someone independently invented it earlier, manually it is a lot of work for a 240 page hoax).

What you're referring to is called a Markov chain. You can generate some very interesting text with two-deep chains, to the extent that a speaker of the language used to generate the probabilities could read it naturally and it'd feel like it's actually in that language, even though it's complete nonsense. I guess my only question would be whether someone could've figured that out back in the 15th century when Markov chains only appeared centuries later (and also had the dedication to compile those statisti

Some linguists have said that the statistical patterns of the text match what would be expected of a natural language, but the article that I read suggested that it is possible to create a random text that looks like a natural language by randomly choosing syllables with a special table. This table of syllables is constructed in such a way that the probability of a certain syllable occurring depends on the syllable that precedes it. To me, this seems like a much more reasonable explanation

iI remember reading an article long ago that said that the Voynich manuscript was made by a con man that wanted to make some quick cash by writing down some gibberish in a book, claiming that it had mystical origins, and selling it off to someone with more money than common sense. \\

The entropy and other statistical measures of the Voynich language is different from Indo-European languages. Zandbergen [voynich.nu] goes through this in some detail. To quote

Voynichese is nearly as information-rich as Julius Caesar's Latin, and significantly more so than the Vulgate version of Genesis.

Voynichese is less information-rich than Latin in the first two characters of each word, but compensates by greater variability in the trailer.

and

The statistics of Voynichese and a Mandarin text written in the Pinyin script (using a trailing numerical character to indicate tone) are very different.

There is actually a lot more of this in this and other papers. The Voynich language, for another example, has a lot more repeated words than (say) English. I seem to remember that the closest match in terms of word repetitions was with Vietnamese, and there was some speculation that it might be an invented script for that language, but that didn't pan out in detailed examination. The upshot is that it is just not realistic to just assume that Voynich is a common language written in some weird script (and, also, that these substitution games have been played before).

Well it was Lee Adama who wrote it originally. It was copied so many times until the 15th century when the Galactica was changed into a wooden ark because the copiers thought the galactica was a boat.And the CAG kept getting mentioned. (eg gollcag). So it must be their legacy after all and we are the cylons.

It's pretty well known by now that at the very least Eriksson reached North American centuries before Columbus, but that doesn't change the fact that Columbus' voyage and success ushered in a new era of colonization, which none of the previous encounters had. The Vikings may have reached Minnesota, but Americans don't descend from them now do they?

We only have one side of the native American genocide. Actually less than that, we have a historical narrative from the Catholic Church which has proven to be falsified in places...one version of one side of the story. I get what you're saying, but really, there's alot that you might not know.

Ex: The Portugese and Dutch Monarch, and very soon after VOC, the Dutch East India company, starting in the early 1500s had regular contact with Japan, and was even given an official 'trading pass' allowing Dutch trade

This has nothing to do with Catholicism. You can equally read about Cook's "discovery" of Hawaii, and last time I checked he was Anglican at the service of an Anglican country.

Discovery of America, it's all about European etnocentrism: it didn't exist until we knew about it.

People who keep pointing that Leif Eriksson got there first are usually only driven by the fact that they don't find Columbus white enough, because if one is to be that pedantic about who got to America first, it is clearly someone from

Again I really don't see what this has to do with Catholicism. The claim of "discovery" of things that are already known by many people except Europeans has been done by people of all religions.

Indeed... in 1492, every Christian in Europe was Catholic... at least formally, so it's somewhat disingenuous to make this a "Catholic" thing. "Gold, glory and God" were the reasons for exploring the New World. I doubt evangelization was always a priority for the explorers, but it certainly was for the missionaries